This application claims the priority of Japanese Patent Application No. 2001-305731, filed Oct. 1, 2001, which is incorporated herein by reference.
The present invention relates to a passenger aircraft, and in particular to a hijack or air-piracy prevention arrangement in the passenger aircraft, which is designed to protect pilots, passengers and crews against any invasion and attack by hijackers.
A horrible terrorism disaster in the U.S.A., widely known as the crashes of hijacked airplanes into skyscrapers on Sep. 11, 2001, has remained in the minds of many people. Since that date, a severe security has been enhanced in many airports to prevent passenger aircraft from a sudden hijacking. In every airport, metal detection systems work to detect anything like metallic murderous weapons such as guns and knives hidden in each passenger who will enter the aircraft, thereby to insure preventing those dangerous things from being brought in the aircraft. However, it is of a high likelihood that anything excepting such metallic things, for example, a glass bottle or a necktie, may be used by a hijacker as a murderous weapon to threaten passengers or crews, or the hijacker per se might be a murderous weapon for the hijacking purpose if he or she acquires a skill of martial art such as boxing, judo or karate. For those reasons, only to enhance the checking of passenger""s body and his or her personal belongings and baggage will not suffice to completely prevent hijacking of aircraft in advance before any potential hijacker enter the aircraft.
In view of the above-stated drawbacks, it is a purpose of the present invention to reduce hijack cases and incidental damages thereto.
In order to achieve such purpose, in accordance with the present invention, there is basically provided a passenger aircraft characterized in that a partition wall means is provided so as to completely partition a manned space into at least two independent manned space sections which are completely isolated from each other, and that a door means and a lavatory means are provided in either of the at least two completely independent manned space sections.
In one aspect of the invention, the manned space may include a flight deck where pilots control the passenger aircraft and a passenger cabin adapted to accommodate passengers therein, wherein one of the foregoing at least two independent manned space sections is the flight deck and another them is the passenger cabin, and the partition wall means comprises a partition wall of a rigid property which is provided between the flight deck and passenger cabin so as to completely isolate the flight deck from the passenger cabin. In this instance, the door means may comprise a door provided in a portion of the passenger aircraft corresponding to the flight deck, thereby allowing pilots to enter and leave the flight deck through the door, independently of the passenger cabin, and further, the lavatory means may comprise a lavatory compartment defined in the flight deck.
In another aspect of the invention, the partition wall means may comprise at least one partition wall of a rigid property which is provided in the passenger cabin so as to completely partition the passenger cabin into at least two independent passenger cabin sections which are completely isolated from each other. Further, the door means may be provided in a portion of the passenger aircraft corresponding to the passenger cabin in such a manner as to allow ingress and egress of persons including the passengers to and from each the at least two independent passenger cabin sections through the door means, and also, the lavatory means may comprise a lavatory compartment defined in each of the at least two independent passenger cabin sections.
The above and other purposes, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent from the following detailed description taken with the accompanying drawings.